It is May 1945 and night has fallen across Europe. The world is at war, cities are aflame and a Lancaster bomber is falling from the sky. Inside the burning cockpit, squadron leader Peter Carter gives his name and age then outlines his politics. “Conservative by nature,” he says. “Labour by experience.” Played by David Niven, the hero of A Matter of Life and Death is your emblematic Englishman – in that he is a muddle. He is trad and prog, romantic and practical, and amiably optimistic even in the teeth of disaster (and perhaps then most of all). He is describing himself as the plane goes down. By proxy, he is describing the film-makers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, too.
All great films are essentially mongrels, created by people from different backgrounds and accommodating sometimes duelling sensibilities. Few, though, are as jumbled and confounding as the movies made by Powell and Pressburger, also known as the Archers (after their production company), with their mix of stiff-upper-lipped Englishness, Albion mysticism and mittel-European sophistication. I have loved these dramas for years, sometimes in spite of their old-school politics and, more recently, precisely because of them. Films such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, and A Matter of Life and Death are patriotic, soul-stirring and gently conservative. These days – perversely – that is what makes them sing.
Like the ill-starred squadron leader, Powell and Pressburger came to earth with a bump – victims of changing fashions and their own vaulting ambitions. Like him, they slipped death, found love and lived on. Cinema Unbound, the British Film Institute’s monumental new retrospective, speaks to the renewed currency of their work, folding recognized classics (The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, I Know Where I’m Going) alongside lesser-known oddities (Ill Met by Moonlight, The Boy Who Turned Yellow). The BFI calls them “quintessentially British”, whatever that means. As with the films, interpretations will vary.
Tellingly, these pictures aren’t pureblood British at all. Director Powell was a self-described “Man of Kent”, a hop farmer’s son who grew up near Canterbury. But his professional partner, the writer Pressburger, was a Hungarian Jew who fled the Nazis. As the Archers, the two produced 24 pictures. Their best were shot against the backdrop of the war and its aftermath, grappling with questions of national identity and fascist ideology.
The films are subversive insofar as they are morally complex, frequently carnal and often downright weird. But they are also secure – even elitist – in their focus on posh ballerinas and righteous squires, blustering colonels and jovial lairds. While the Archers’ work spoke truth to power, it did so in the service of propping up the old order. It was challenging and radical, but it was never bent on revolution.
The critic Raymond Durgnat once called Powell a “High Tory”. Thelma Schoonmaker – Powell’s widow – objects to that. “It’s too simple,” she says. “Michael was much more complicated. He wasn’t necessarily a political person, but he cared deeply about people, about his community, and was always open to the world. He lived every moment to the full – he wasn’t a ‘High Tory’ at all. That description of him is completely wrong.”
All great films are essentially mongrels, created by people from different backgrounds.
When the Archers fell from favor, Powell initially went to ground in Gloucestershire. The director couldn’t afford to heat his cottage. At one point, he attempted, unsuccessfully, to sell two porcelain ducks to an antiques shop. “In that way, yes, he was a victim of political change,” Schoonmaker admits. “The Labour government came in. The kitchen sink school was just beginning. The films that he made with Emeric were seen as old-fashioned and colonial. That was hard for him to deal with, first because it was wrong, but also because he loved England so much, right to the very end of his life.”
James Bell, the BFI’s senior curator, was raised on kitchen sink dramas and the French New Wave. Like me, he approached Powell and Pressburger’s films with suspicion. The received pronunciation accents were a barrier, the patriotism reeked of mothballs. You had to set aside your preconceptions to allow the movies’ magic to take hold. “In the 90s there was still a whiff of musty Englishness about them,” Bell says. “I remember a colleague saying, ‘But aren’t they cozy teatime films?’ – which couldn’t be further from the truth.”
The way he sees it, the Archers’ subject is British identity and the way it connects with the rest of the world. The stories are about tradition and continuity. But the films are questioning and critical – not cozy at all. Explicitly or otherwise, they ask us who we are and where we stand. Bell says: “I think that chimes more than ever in a post-Brexit world.”
Schoonmaker balked at the High Tory tag. Bell, though, is less certain. “If it is High Tory to champion social responsibility, then that is definitely there. If it is High Tory to want to preserve the countryside, then that is there as well. There is also a mystical aspect to the films – that great romantic, inclusive quality. You could make the case that this is High Tory, too.”
I call Kevin Macdonald in Los Angeles. Macdonald is the director of Touching the Void, State of Play, and The Last King of Scotland. But he is also Pressburger’s grandson and an authority on his work. Pressburger fled Nazi Berlin and lost his mother in Auschwitz. So he was an alien, an outsider. He desperately wanted to belong. “He was like so many other refugees in that he never felt 100% at home in the UK,” Macdonald says. “But he also wouldn’t ever hear a bad word said against the country. He was a member of the Conservative Party. I found his party membership.”
The films are conservative but that doesn’t make them reactionary. “They’re only Tory in the sense that they recognize the value of continuity in the culture,” Macdonald says. “You see that in A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I’m Going, Gone to Earth, and Colonel Blimp. They value social responsibility and the history that is embedded in a community. To me, that’s a major factor of old-fashioned, paternalistic, pre-Thatcherite Toryism.”
The films are subversive insofar as they are morally complex, frequently carnal and often downright weird.
I am glad he raises A Canterbury Tale. It is my favorite Powell-Pressburger, maybe my all-time favorite film: a work of gorgeous, broken glory that spins the tale of three wartime pilgrims (land girl, British soldier, US sergeant) in the Kent countryside. For years, I assumed this was mostly Powell’s picture. In fact, it is the one that Pressburger claimed as his own.
A Canterbury Tale was a story of exiles as told by an exile; a British movie produced by an immigrant crew. The cinematographer and production designer were both German Jews. The composer – Allan Gray – was born Józef Żmigrod in Poland. Even Pressburger, a registered “enemy alien”, had to report back to London every night of the shoot.
”A Canterbury Tale was seen as wartime propaganda,” says Macdonald. “But really it’s a film about fragility. It’s about people struggling to hold on, fighting for their values. I think that was always the central feature of Emeric’s work. It’s not about the people, it’s not even about the place. It’s always about the underlying values with him.”
I’m speaking to Macdonald in the week of the Conservative Party conference. The headlines are dominated by tribalism and wedge issues. Red-meat rhetoric targets asylum seekers and multiculturalism. Our concept of conservatism has changed; the Overton window has lurched rightwards. Powell and Pressburger’s politics were once dismissed as retrograde and naive. These days, they feel humane and progressive – even borderline radical.
If anything, the films become fresher the more time goes by. “I used to think that it was because of their oddness,” Macdonald says. “The weird characters, jokes and stories, the postmodern self-consciousness that was somehow ahead of its time. But now I think it’s more about their human values. Their films are about rejecting bigotry, treating people with decency and finding connections in the cultural melee that might otherwise divide us. Look around us right now. We are living in a time when everything is about division and hatred and fear. Powell and Pressburger stood against all of that. I think they still do today.”
Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell + Pressburger is running at BFI Southbank and across the U.K. until December 31
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Xan Brooks is a U.K.-based freelance writer and broadcaster specializing in cinema